Showing titles in Death, Grief & Loss

Cass Donish courageously summons the poems to witness their own state of “obliteration,” widowed by suicide and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding. Elegizing their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, they insist that the intimate, ongoing conversation with a beloved mysteriously continues after loss. With searing vulnerability and profound perceptiveness, Donish finds a fierce new aesthetic for the disorientation of grief.

A poem about consent.

The words you are about to hear have been ongoing for many, many years. They are not written to make you feel bad for me; they are written more as a lesson to myself. The words were never prethought but always came from some place within me forcibly picking up a pen and putting their utterances down at once. It was as if it was a command from the very depths of me, a strength in me that has always been there. Someone once said it was a goddess in me, the strong goddess who drives us on till we see the truth.

This is a small book for the small hours when we sit alone in the dark or feel as though our grief isolates us. In the months following her husband’s sudden death, Sally Rosenthal explored her reactions to loss and came to realize that strength is a synergetic wisdom woven from the love passed on through the examples of relatives and beloved animals. In poems and prose, she shares what she has learned about survival and resilience. Come sit with Sally at her kitchen table and share the journey.

The energies animating Saints of Little Faith, Megan Pinto’s electrifying debut in poetry, are a forceful quiet, a loud stillness, the caesura between a lightning strike and the sound of thunder. Everywhere, the speaker sees the numinous power of language, the incipience of things to come, even a kind of catastrophic grace in desolation and destruction—as if within the terrain of her own obsession, she recognizes the familiar, ever-changing seasons.

The poems in this collection fly from the microcosm of ripples in a lake to the macrocosm of light bending in a black hole, from math to jazz, from informal to formal, from the here-and-now to the hereafter. This short book contains an infinite universe - one that you will long to return to again and again.

From the author of I Saw a Man comes a powerful drama in verse that captures both the trauma of modern warfare and the difficulty of transitioning back to normal life after combat.

Tombstones is a collection of some of the finest dark verse and horror-themed literature while exploring the various elements of dreams, erotica, and psychology and visualizing complete fear and terror...including the popular dark verse "The Fallen Angel", the powerfully erotic vampire tale "Blood Hungry", and a journey into the mind of the "Wicked Torturer".

Engaging the matriarchal structure of the beehive, Amanda Moore explores the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting, Requeening brings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love.

Outside Gravity - Poems from a Personal Journey by Paul Burnore contains lyrical, crafted poems about loss, grief, and coming to terms with both death and life. These poems are seasoned by an international life and close observation about what really matters. In Outside Gravity, many poems grapple with the loss of a young son and the nearly crippling grief that followed. But this loss is balanced with broader reflections about death, along with a rebalancing of life containing love and the splendor of nature.

The women in Allison Adair’s debut collection—luminous and electric from the first line to the last—live in places that have been excavated for gold and precious ores. They understand the nature of being hollowed out, of being “the planet’s stone / core as it tries to carve out one secret place and fails.” And so, as these poems take us from the midst of the Civil War to our current era, they chart fairy tales that are at once unsettling and painfully familiar, never forgetting that cruelty compels us to search for tenderness.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicentre of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame and critical pessimism to imagine how we can strive towards a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

In this volume, the lives of three sibling dreamers play out in verse, threading enchantment into the challenges of growing up. As they find humor in tiny ordeals, meaning in disappointment, and beauty even in tragedy, their poems will open your heart, offering vulnerability and transparency throughout. In Sunshine or in Shadow is a treasure of laughter and tears that will stay with you forever.

Entre o luto pela morte do pai e a felicidade pelo nascimento da filha, Allan Dias Castro nos leva a ver a saudade não mais através da tristeza da perda, mas como a celebração da grandiosidade da vida. Mesclando poesia com histórias pessoais, este é um mergulho nas memórias que todos nós compartilhamos: os almoços na casa da vó, as noites febris da infância, os causos na companhia dos amigos, os conselhos dos mais velhos para aplacar nossos medos.

“Il libro della follia” è la prima traduzione integrale in italiano di "The Book of Folly", che Anne Sexton diede alle stampe nel 1972. Lo stile confessionale che aveva reso celebre l’autrice, fruttandole nel 1967 il premio Pulitzer, giunge qui alla piena maturità trasformandosi nell’allegoria di un Gran Teatro psichedelico. La Signora Benestante che scrive occasionalmente versi rispettando le forme metriche lascia il posto, definitivamente e consapevolmente, al personaggio della Poetessa Martire della società benpensante e all’aspirante suicida, in un rovesciamento parodico dei valori patriarcali.

When tensions veer between hope and despair, the ensuing fracture can swing like a scythe and cut a ragged seam between past and present. In One Wild Word Away, Geffrey Davis weaves a deft set of poems about illness, family, loss, and rebirth. The luxurious sonics and crisp descriptions in each line are haunted by grief and buoyed by love as the speaker confronts generational trauma and the potential loss of a loved one while in the process of raising his own son.

Tracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood—a writer who has fundamentally shaped the contemporary literary landscapes—Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2023 assembles Atwood’s most vital poems in one essential volume. In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful, and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voice to remarkably drawn characters—mythological figures, animals, and everyday people—all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own.

It is fitting that the debut of Jimmy Cost – the New Mexican outlaw poet, singer and songwriter – is a memoir. A book of spontaneously fine-tuned ballads that reflect the many relationships of the multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic artist. First Thing on the Road is rooted in the connection of energies through lost love, the acceptance of unrequited love and realizing the truth in “true” love.

A poetic novella about love, loss, addiction, and recovery

“We lived overlooking the walls overlooking the cemetery.” So begins the title poem of this collection, whose recursive temporality is filled with living, grieving things, punctuated by an unseen world of roots, bodies, and concealed histories. Like a cemetery, too, The Milk Hours sets unlikely neighbors alongside each other: Hegel and Murakami, Melville and the Persian astronomer al-Sufi, enacting a transhistorical poetics even as it brims with intimacy.